But not everyone is excited about the new law. #GroceriesNotGuns, a hashtag started by activists presumably concerned about encountering a loaded gun in the cereal aisle, has coincided with the decision of several grocery chains, including H-E-B, Safeway, and Whole Foods, to opt out of open carry.

While houses of worship are not automatically excluded from open carry, they’re free to exempt their properties through the posting of signs and distribution of verbal warnings. And, while some churches (like the Roman Catholic diocese of Lubbock) have confirmed that they’re opting out of open carry, they’ve remained mum on their plans for pastoral direction and the posting of required signs.

With businesses opting out and churches uneasy, Texan police are also bracing for a spike in 911 calls as the law goes into effect. Some citizens are also concerned about how to tell the difference between a good guy lustily handling his holstered gun and, uh, a slightly less good guy doing the same. As a Dallas city hall employee recently remarked to the Dallas Morning News, “There is no barometer for knowing which person is in their right mind to have a weapon like that.”

November 21, 2018

Trump versus Roberts: a battle over judicial legitimacy.

On Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to challenge Chief Justice John Roberts on the integrity of the courts. Earlier in the day, the Associated Press had released an interview with Roberts where he objected to categorizing judges by their political affiliation. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

In response, Trump tweeted:

Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have “Obama judges,” and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an “independent judiciary,” but if it is why......

.....are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security - these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!

Now that Trump has decided to answer Roberts directly, the Supreme Court justice faces a difficult choice: Does he escalate the war of words (which would further corrode the court’s role as an independent arbiter) or does he abstain from responding (which leaves Trump unanswered). Neither choice is attractive.

Chief Justice John Roberts has had enough of Trump’s anti-judge rhetoric.

Up until now, Roberts has stayed silent on President Trump’s repeated attacks on the judiciary—including on Roberts himself, over the ruling in favor of Obamacare in 2012. On Tuesday, however, Trump criticized federal district judge Jon Tigar for blocking his executive order targeting asylum-seekers on the southern border. “This was an Obama judge,” he told reporters before venting other grievances about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and hinting at some kind of retaliation.

Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly rejected Trump’s description in a statement Wednesday. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he told the Associated Press. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

While a public rebuke of the president by the chief justice is extremely rare, Trump is also more openly hostile to the federal judiciary than any of his modern predecessors. He argued on the campaign trail that Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t be trusted to oversee the Trump University fraud lawsuits in 2016 because he is “a Mexican.” (Curiel is from Indiana.) Trump also attacked multiple “so-called” judges who ruled against the Muslim ban last year, prompting a rare critique from Justice Neil Gorsuch during his Supreme Court confirmation process.

So, why now? Roberts may have decided to intervene after Trump told reporters that the judge’s ruling was “not law” and suggested he would escalate his campaign against the courts. “I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen anymore,” the president said on Tuesday. The chief justice and his colleagues have also spent recent months publicly reaffirming their nonpartisanship after the corrosive battle to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh dealt a serious blow to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and perceived independence.

United Arab Emirates convicts British graduate student as a spy.

A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has found Matthew Hedges, a 31 year old graduate student of Durham University, guilty of spying. Hedges, who denies the charges, faces a life sentence.

Hedges’s family considers the trial a travesty, the BBC reports, maintaining that “during the first six weeks of his detention he was interrogated without a lawyer and consular access was unavailable,” and that “during this time he was made to sign a document in Arabic which transpired to be a confession.”

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he was “deeply shocked and disappointed” by the court’s decision and promised he’d make telephone calls to UAE officials. He added that the verdict was“not what we expect from a friend and trusted partner of the United Kingdom, and runs contrary to earlier assurances.” The United Kingdom is allied with the UAE, which is a major purchaser of British arms.

Hedges’s wife, Daniela Tejada, criticized both the governments of both Britain and the UAE.

“Matthew is innocent,” she said. “The Foreign Office know this and have made it clear to the UAE authorities that Matthew is not a spy for them. This whole case has been handled appallingly from the very beginning with no-one taking Matthew’s case seriously.”

John Kelly signs an order allowing American troops to use lethal force at the border.

The Military Times is reporting that Kelly, the White House chief of staff, has signed a memo that authorizing the American military to “perform those military protective activities that theSecretary of Defensedetermines are reasonably necessary” in the service of defending border agents. The memo, described as a “Cabinet order,” defines these activities to include “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention. and cursory search.”

It’s unclear why this authorization came from the desk of Kelly, rather than the president. Further, as the Military Times notes, the order might run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of the military for domestic purposes.

As The Military Times notes, the new order is in keeping with the innovative use of the military for border control under the Trump administration. “Military forces always have the inherent right to self defense, but defense of the border agents on U.S. soil is new,” the newspaper points out. “In addition, troops have been given additional authorities in previous years to assist border agents with drug interdictions, but the widespread authorization of use of force for thousands of active-duty troops is unique to this deployment.”

In early November, President Donald Trump seemed to suggest that lethal force would be an appropriate response to migrants who threw rocks at American personnel. “I told them, ‘consider that a rifle,’” Trump told reporters. “When theythrow rockslike they did at the Mexico military and police, I say ‘consider it a rifle.’” The president later backtracked, after the comments were criticized by retired military officers.

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Steve Bannon’s plan to remake Europe is being thwarted by the existence of things called laws.

The former CEO of the Trump campaign has launched an ambitious scheme to foster hard-right nativist politics in Europe but, as The Guardianreports, he is being hemmed in by local laws.

“The former chief strategist to Donald Trump has spent months trying to recruit European parties to his Brussels-based group, the Movement, which he promised would operate as kind of a political consultancy for like-minded parties campaigning in the bloc-wide vote in May 2019,” the newspaper observes. “But the Guardian has established that Bannon would be barred or prevented from doing any meaningful work in nine of the 13 countries in which he is seeking to campaign, according to national electoral bodies and relevant ministries. Confronted with the findings, Bannon acknowledged he was taking legal advice on the matter.”

Bannon has promised to spend millions of his own money as well as disperse funds from unnamed sources. He also wants to offer in-kind service in the form of sophisticated data-collection and analytics, to be used for social media campaigns. The plan is to further inflame right-wing nationalism in Europe via a transnational network. As such, Bannon’s project is fundamentally ironic, which makes it all the more appropriate that it is national legal barriers that are proving to be the biggest hurdle.

Bannon’s Movement will almost certainly not get far. Aside from legal difficulties, some of the local groups Bannon wants to support are shunning his offers of assistance.

Indeed, The Guardian suggests that European laws are so stringent and Bannon himself is so controversial, the Movement could end up only helping one figure, a Dutch member of Parliament. When told this, Bannon replied, “It’s a start.”

CNN is reporting that there is further evidence that President Donald Trump wanted to use his presidential powers to punish his political enemies. “President Donald Trump on multiple occasions raised with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Matt Whitaker, who was then-chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, whether the Justice Department was progressing in investigating Hillary Clinton, according to a source familiar with the matter,” the cable news network reports. “The President also wanted his previous White House counsel, Don McGahn, to ask the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton on numerous occasions, but McGahn rebuffed doing that, the source said.”

Buttressing the CNN account, a New York Timesarticle added that McGahn and other White House lawyers prepared a memo outlining the problems with the president’s preferred course of action. “For starters, Justice Department lawyers could refuse to follow Mr. Trump’s orders even before an investigation began, setting off another political firestorm,” the Times summarizes. “If charges were brought, judges could dismiss them. And Congress, they added, could investigate the president’s role in a prosecution and begin impeachment proceedings.”

These accounts seem to confirm some critics’ suspicion that Trump is an instinctively authoritarian president who has been saved from his worst instincts by staff resistance. The open question is whether staff shake-ups will now give Trump a White House more amenable to his autocratic tendencies.

November 20, 2018

All romaine lettuce is unsafe to eat—again. Here’s why.

This past summer, I spoke with food policy expert Darin Detwiler, whose 17-month old son died in a food-borne E. colioutbreak. He told me that the infamous romaine lettuceE. coli outbreak of summer 2018, which killed five people, would not be the last.

He was right.

Outbreak Alert: Do not eat any romaine lettuce, including whole heads and hearts, chopped, organic and salad mixes with romaine until we learn more. If you don’t know if it’s romaine or can’t confirm the source, don’t eat it. https://t.co/NrFOIxG8hxpic.twitter.com/FuzkHv4bd3

This stunning warning from the CDC, issued two days before Thanksgiving, advises Americans against eating any romaine lettuce—no matter where it’s from. “Consumers who have any type of romaine lettuce in their home should not eat it and should throw it away, even if some of it was eaten and no one has gotten sick,” the agency said. No deaths from this outbreak have been reported yet, but 32 people in 11 states have become sick, and 13 people have been hospitalized, the CDC said.

The reason CDC is warning against all romaine lettuce is because it has no idea where, specifically, the deadly bacteria is coming from. This is similar to the summer outbreak. As I wrote in July, “No single grower, harvester, processor, or distributor has been blamed [for that outbreak], and investigators are still unsure whether contamination happened during the growing, washing, chopping, or bagging process. So far, the agencies have only released one finding: That the same E. coli strain found in sickened people across the country was also in Arizona’s canal water, which is used to irrigate crops.”

But we don’t need to now where exactly this E. coli is coming from to know why America is experiencing yet another outbreak of food-borne illness from this deadly pathogen. It’s happening because the government has not acted quickly enough to fix well-known problems with our food-borne illness prevention system.

E. coli comes from poop. That means there was poop on the lettuce. Most likely, the poop was in the water used to grow, wash, chop, or bag the lettuce. America has poor regulation of water used on crops. Only very large farms, rather than all farms, are required to sample and test the water used to grow and clean produce. The E. coli tests they use are also ineffective. “They’re only measuring for E. coli total, not the specific types of E. coli that can make you sick,” one biologist told me.

Small farmers not subject to regulation also don’t have great incentive to go above and beyond to test their crops. “If I’m a farm owner, I ask myself: Do I pay to have a third party lab to test these water samples on a regular basis for me to use this water?” Detwiler told me. “Or do I consider the small likelihood of someone being able to tie the problem back to me, and decide against it?”

The CDC and the FDA will likely spend months trying to figure out the source of this new, Thanksgiving E. coli outbreak. Those resources might be better spent figuring out how to fix known problems in our system before more people die.

Former Michigan State University president is charged with lying to police about Larry Nassar.

The Lansing State Journal is reporting that Lou Anna Simon, until earlier this year the president of Michigan State University (MSU), was “charged today in Eaton County District Court with two felony counts and two misdemeanor counts. She faces up to four years in prison if convicted.” The arrest is a byproduct of the case of Larry Nassar, who had served as sports physician at MSU from 1998 until 2016. The following year he pled guilty to charges of possessing child pornography and sexual assault in a case where more than 200 women have made allegations against him.

Simon served as president of Michigan State University (MSU) from 2005 until earlier this year. In Senate testimony this year, Simon claimed that nobody at the university was aware of Nassar’s abusive activities before 2016. This claim is contradicted by what she has now admitted to the police. As The Lansing State Journal notes, “Simon told State Police investigators that she was aware that in 2014 a sports medicine doctor was the subject of a Title IX investigation. According to the charging document filed by the AG’s Office, she knew it was Nassar who was the subject of that 2014 investigation.”

On Tuesday, the president of the United States issued a statement, rife with exclamation marks, explaining why he was standing with Saudi Arabia despite the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an American permanent resident. In the key passage of the statement, Trump expressed uncertainty on the key question: the culpability of Saudi leaders in the assassination.

King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!

In fact, the CIA has leaked their conclusion that they are certain with a high degree of confidence that bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder.

Aside from the comment indicating uncertainty, Trump also repeated smears against the late journalist (“Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an ‘enemy of the state’ and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”), while appending provisos. (“My decision is in no way based on that—this is an unacceptable and horrible crime.”) Trump also repeated the falsehood that Saudi Arabia has “agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States,” creating “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

As former CIA director John Brennan noted, Trump’s remarks mean that any accountability in the Khashoggi case will have to come from Congress.

Since Mr. Trump excels in dishonesty, it is now up to members of Congress to obtain & declassify the CIA findings on Jamal Khashoggi’s death. No one in Saudi Arabia—most especially the Crown Prince—should escape accountability for such a heinous act. https://t.co/exQrZKybhk

Walmart and other corporations are pulling support of senator after “public hanging” remark.

Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is losing the support of major corporations in a backlash to comments she made earlier this month. On November 2, while standing next to a supporter, Hyde-Smith said, “if he invited me to a public hanging I’d be on the front row.” The remarks were widely seen as an allusion to lynching.

"If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row"- Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith says in Tupelo, MS after Colin Hutchinson, cattle rancher, praises her.

Walmart contributed $2,000 to Hyde-Smith’s campaign. After receiving public criticism for the donation, including a tweet from the actress Debra Messing, the retail juggernaut said it was asking for the donation back:

Hi Debra. Completely understand your concern. Sen. Hyde-Smith’s recent comments clearly do not reflect the values of our company and associates. As a result, we are withdrawing our support and requesting a refund of all campaign donations.

Two other corporations, Union Pacific and Boston Scientific, have also withdrawn their donations to Hyde-Smith.

On Monday, Boston Science tweeted:

We were not aware of Senator Hyde-Smith’s remarks when this contribution was made on November 8, and we have requested a refund. We reject the Senator’s statements, which are not aligned with our company’s core values.